It might
seem like a silly question, but once in your life you probably wondered what
evil things lurked in the shadows. And no matter how much grownups assured you
there was nothing there, it was obvious that adults had spent a lot of energy and
a lot of time inventing things to push the dark back into the corners.

Darkness is
not just a thing of our childhood superstitions. Now we're told that science
has its dark spots too. Dark matter and dark energy – these are terms we use to
fill in the gaps for the effects we can see or measure, even though the causes
are still unknown.

Likewise politics
has its own dark forces, and they're far more real than anything you feared as
a kid.

It's called
dark money, and it's how secret donors get their funds to political candidates and
causes without you knowing about it.

One of these
you might be familiar with, already. They're called political action committees,
or PACs. Initially, they were a way for lots of people with similar interests
to pool their resources together and affect political change.

But there was
a more sinister use for PACs.

Sometimes a
particular donor might be unpopular with one group of voters or another – their
own political boogey man. And it would be suicide for a candidate to accept
money from them directly.

So
politicians and their benefactors invented a system called PAC-to-PAC contributions.

It worked
like this. First, a donor would direct their contributions to several different
PACs. Often those PACs had names that had no relationship whatsoever with their
contributor's intentions. A polluter could contribute to an environmental PAC,
or a union could give to a business PAC.

And at the
same time one donor made contributions to those PACs, others were doing the
same – some of them you might consider politically nefarious, others completely
harmless.

From there,
the consultants who controlled those PACs would shuffle the money between them
in a never-ending shell game. The cash -- at least on paper -- would become
what accountants call "fungible," meaning it was all basically one indistinguishable
pool and impossible to trace to its source.

If this
seems like money laundering, that's kind of the point. Candidates could take
cash from unpopular donors and no one would be the wiser but them.

You might
have noticed that I've been using the past tense. That's because in 2010, something
happened. In Alabama, a Republican majority took control of the legislature and,
in one of its first acts, it banned PAC-to- PAC transfers.

So did
everyone live happily ever after?

Hardly.

Something even
darker took the place of PACs. They're non-profits called 501(c)4s, and their
effect on campaign finance transparency is growing.

Under IRS
rules, 501(c)4s were meant to exclusively
promote the social welfare. But we're not talking about money for poor people. You
see, because the IRS interpreted exclusively
to mean primarily, these non-profits have
become a conduit for political action and campaign cash.

And since
then, in recent years, the IRS has been so lax about policing these non-profits,
exclusively has all but come to mean –
umm -- some.

In practice,
501(c)4s work similar to PACs. They have names that can conceal their real
purpose. Donors put money in, and the non-profits push money out.

A 501(c)4
can't fund a candidate directly, but it can buy advertising that criticizes a
candidate on a particular issue, or promotes a candidate's record on another.

Also, their
lobbying power is unlimited.

But there's
one major difference between 501(c)4s and PACs. Unlike PACs, 501(c)4s can keep
their donors completely secret. Whoever is pumping money into them is
impossible to see -- meaning that candidate you vote for at the ballot box
might have received help from someone you hate, and there's no way for you or
anyone else to tell.